Curry Page 6

  Nothing beats actual travel for a real education, they say (‘they’ quite often being bartenders or servers or students who spend off-seasons fucking hot Australians or Swedes in hostels and reporting back on markets and forest temples seen along the way). But entering the subjectivity of a novel or a travel memoir is a crucial supplement to a worldly education. Elizabeth Gilbert’s India is one I’ll never see, because I can as little imagine myself spending weeks in an ashram as I can envision going to astronaut camp or being good at sports. As a minor character says in the film Total Recall: ‘What is it that is exactly the same about every single vacation you have ever taken? … You! You’re the same. No matter where you go, there you are.’

  There’s a subtle difference between travel and tourism – one deeply bound up with authenticity. Elizabeth Gilbert largely accepts her role as a tourist, as she’s shaping each place she visits to the brand of experience she wants to emerge with. Jhumpa Lahiri’s sojourn in Rome (where she still lives, writing in Italian) is a purposeful inhabitation of another culture, a visit that’s meant to turn into a stay, and maybe one day into a kind of homecoming. Belonging and authenticity aren’t quite the same thing, and Lahiri, on account of race, cannot ever completely belong to this other place.

  Great travel writing allows you to travel as someone else. And certain brands of writing about food or culture allow you to remember yourself as someone else. Part of the appeal of authentic-Indian cookbooks like Monsoon Diary and diasporic narratives like Sabrina Dhawan’s script for the Mira Nair film Monsoon Wedding, in which members of a dispersed Punjabi family return to Delhi for a wedding and end up confronting past traumas, is the chance to enter someone else’s remembering. We want to trace a journey backward, to its completion in the past. The more often a tale of returning to the real in past and homeland is told, however, the greater the chance is that its recurring elements start to ring false. It doesn’t help when the publisher’s marketing moves, such as inserting Monsoon into the title of a memoir-cookbook released a couple of years after Nair’s hit movie, transparently commercialize South Asian recollections and nostalgia.

  This idea of travelling as someone else drew me to another Italian journey, a fictional one by a contemporary of Rushdie’s. In his novel The Comfort of Strangers, Ian McEwan talks about the moment of entering the authentic, as his husband-and-wife protagonists enter a space they realize they’d been dreaming of throughout their trip to Venice. Robert, the man who befriends the couple and eventually lures them into an experience so unpleasantly real it involves passing through sex into death, tempts them with the promise of a ‘very good place’ for food. The place where they end up offers only booze, but even if their stomachs stay empty it nonetheless gives them something they truly crave. It’s the real deal, a place where people like them – outsiders – aren’t supposed to be.

  Then, despite the absence of food, and helped on by the wine, they began to experience the pleasure, unique to tourists, of making a discovery, finding something real. They relaxed, they settled into the noise and smoke; they in turn asked the serious, intent questions of tourists gratified to be talking at last to an authentic citizen.

  This is precisely the same experience-request that books by brown people are often asked to fulfill, and not only for the audience – often, the author also seems to want that experience of becoming an authentic citizen. A trip to the subcontinent is supposed to be more than a holiday, and a book about people of South Asian descent is supposed to be more than a novel. An audience may demand that it fulfill the function of literary tourism, offering not just a glimpse of another place and time, but an experience of authenticity. And for the diasporic writer? He or she gains the experience of that pleasure, unique to tourists, of making a discovery, finding something real. The disconnected experience of being a person in the West, let alone a person of colour in the West, doesn’t lend itself to a sense of comfort or peace: fitting your own story to a narrative where answers are to be found in a familial, national past can be extremely soothing.

  Is there a problem with these expectations existing in the genre? Only that they constrain and limit the potential methods of expression for brown writers. No page can be entirely blank when you have a general idea of the shape of what you’re supposed to write. For a diasporic writer, the hidden demand to play both tour guide and tourist could lead to a fulfilling negotiation of identity, family, and place – and it could also seal off other paths of exploration, other stories the writer may feel more driven to tell, to an audience that he or she may suspect doesn’t exist. A tacit request from readers to create an authentic experience can, ironically, result in the opposite: false stories, or stories with false elements burying truthful details and experience, built on conventions created by other writers and the categorizations of the publishing industry.

  Daniyal Mueenudin, author of the excellent 2009 short story collection In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, offers a case study in how the sense of discovering authenticity and the comfort of a homeland can function for readers and writers. The stories are multifaceted and complex, but Mueenudin’s introductory essay to the Reading Group Guide at the end of the book drives directly to the authenticity-appeal of his work:

  Half Pakistani and half American, I have spent equal amounts of time in each country, and so, knowing both cultures well and belonging to both, I equally belong to neither, look at both with an outsider’s eyes. These stories are written from the place in between, written to help both me and my reader bridge the gap.

  Of the eight stories contained In Other Rooms, seven are set in Pakistan and one in Paris. The ‘gap,’ apparently, is to be bridged in one direction: toward Pakistan, and away from the West. Handily, this journey parallels the biographical fragment Mueenudin provides us with in his essay.

  Mueenudin grew up on a Pakistani farm that parallels the parcels of terrain that connect the upper-, middle-, and working-class characters in his stories. He gained insight into the lives of the servants and villagers around his father’s property, who paid little attention to him because he was a child: ‘I learned the rhythms and details of their lives in a way I never could as a grown-up … These people, their gestures, and intonations as I observed them in my childhood, appear throughout the stories in In Other Rooms, Other Wonders.’ After college at Dartmouth in America, Mueenudin returned to take control of the family farm as his father was dying – with the administration of his land stabilized, Mueenudin returned to the U.S., got a Yale law degree, and then a job.

  Sitting in my office on the forty-second floor of a black skyscraper in Manhattan, looking out over the East river, I gradually developed confidence in the stories I had lived through during those years on the farm. I realized that I was in a unique position to write these stories for a Western audience – stories about the farm and the old feudal ways, the dissolving feudal order and the new way coming, the sleek businessmen from the cities. I resigned from the law firm, returned to Pakistan, and began writing the stories that make up this book.

  Mueenudin’s short account of his life is, necessarily, missing details. But it’s telling that after being specific about two of his degrees – his undergraduate work at Dartmouth and the law degree at Yale – he skips over his MFA at the University of Arizona, where he began to write the Pakistan-set stories that eventually captured the attention of top NYC agent Bill Clegg. These details are also part of the truth, and parallel the bios of most modern literary writers in the West. Still, for a reading group taking on stories set in a distant land, revelatory of insider truths about many levels of a culture that Mueenudin is in a ‘unique position to write … for a Western audience,’ workshop and agent talk isn’t salient. In fact, it interferes with the reader’s conception of a leap from childhood experience in Pakistan to a not-quite-fulfilling adulthood in the West, then back to studied reflection in Pakistan. What Mueenudin puts across in his short essay is his link to the realness of the Pakistan he grew up in, where he had access to
villagers that would be impossible to regain as an adult. He wants to authenticate the stories, by showing readers how he was tapped into a life that was earthy, more about his knowledge of the ‘fertilizer, diesel engines, and the qualities of soil’ of running his father’s farm than the airy irreality of life on the forty-second floor in Manhattan.

  To be clear, Mueenudin’s pursuit of truths in the past and his half-homeland of Pakistan don’t mean he emerges with fanciful or half-baked stories. His hyper-awareness of the unjust but seemingly unchangeable nature of class relations, familial obligations, and the complex inequalities of relationships between the sexes everywhere from Pakistan to Paris make his work much more than a series of souvenir keepsakes of the lives of the unimaginably poor in Pakistan. There is no reason to doubt the sincerity of Mueenudin’s deep ties to Pakistan, to dismiss his writing about the country of his childhood as a commercial decision. The stories are enriched by a lack of nostalgic sentimentality about life, rich and poor, in Pakistan, and a tangible discontent and longing for escape that affects characters rich and poor. One of the characters in ‘Our Lady of Paris,’ encountering his son’s white American girlfriend, admits that he wouldn’t have minded being born in America: ‘The one thing I’ve missed, I sometimes feel, is the sensation of being absolutely free, to do exactly what I like, to go where I like, to act as I like. I suspect only an American ever feels that. You aren’t weighed down by your families, and you aren’t weighed down by history.’ Mueenudin’s connection to his family, his personal history, and its relation to the changing face of Pakistan and to the West point to another reaction to the ‘absolute’ freedom his character describes. When presented with this freedom, thanks to financial possibility and a top-class law degree, Mueenudin’s ties to land and family still have a powerful appeal – one that also attracts readers, both from the West and the brown diaspora, who can’t boast his family bonds and lived experiences of a homeland. Books like his don’t only give us access to a far-off place by depicting life there with precision: for readers seeking an experience of a different home, closer to the earth than a skyscraper office, writers like Mueenudin provide transport. And there’s something about the divided subcontinent that has long made it a place that readers, travellers, and eaters look to for truth.

  Even if the subcontinent was never one’s home to begin with, it can serve – and has served – as a spiritual home in conversation, books, films, and pilgrimage-like trips. Since the example of the Beatles, a major influx of Western tourists have come to India in search of spiritual reality: the authentic home for the soul that Elizabeth Gilbert sought, a place where truth can be found in spiritual slogans, riddles, in long, cross-legged communions with silence and humidity. Gita Mehta observed both these visitors and the industry of fake fakirs who arose to embrace their curiosity and take their money in her 1979 book Karma Cola. As the vivid success of Eat, Pray, Love and Chip Wilson’s Lululemon empire have proven, the guru era is far from over. It’s alive both in the form of useful spiritual relationships and in darker incarnations. There are fraudulent ashrams and cultish inveiglers all over the subcontinent and in the islands where we scattered: everyone has a cousin or six who gives 38 per cent of their income to a Leader who, in exchange, relieves them of their connections to family and friends. In the West, too, gurus proliferate, in small local temples, Sai Baba megastructures, and the Bikram Yoga training camp.

  Mehta’s book goes beyond simply calling shit on hippies and drawing scolding portraits of false gurus, and many of her observations can be easily drawn over to reflect on the writing and reading of diasporic South Asian lit. Karma Cola is history-as-reportage, a sardonic chronicle of minor vengeance for colonialism and yet another rippling development in the relationship between India and the West, the series of colonizers who just wouldn’t go away and who the country can now actually extract value from, a welcome variation on the one-way cash flow of the former empirical relationship. India could sell its wisdom, packaged for consumption by America and Europe’s young and directionless – or old and directionless, for that matter. A welcome influx of cash in exchange for knowledge or simply the ability to clear one’s mind of clutter drifted into post-partition India from Europe and the Americas, and, inevitably, leaked back out – the residual path-to-wisdom promises of the Maharishi giving an often-unwanted sheen of higher truth to the work of writers and cooks who wanted to do good work.

  For Westerners, the sixties and seventies represented a key moment in the creation of what Rushdie has called an ‘India of the mind.’ This India contained simpler, purer ways and answers to the most difficult problems through the miracle of relinquishing worldly wealth to a country willing to accept that wealth. This country-sized temple had been building up in white minds for parts of the past two centuries – George Harrison’s sitar lessons just accelerated construction. Mehta writes:

  Earlier in the century the Brahmins of Western intellectual thought had paved the way. Aldous Huxley had struggled with Vedanta and dared to expand his mind. William Butler Yeats … found ‘in that East something ancestral in ourselves, something we must bring into the light.’ These were the thoughts of the highest caste, the scholar, deliberating on language, meaning and despair.

  Now it was the turn of the populists, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, to become pacemakers for a faltering Western heart, and they achieved a more striking success.

  Next in this path of inheritance, decades on from Beatlemania, is the displaced diasporic subject: the brown writer, or the protagonist in that writer’s novel, who is embedded in the West but also has a ‘faltering heart’ in need of revival by the ancestral tonic of a voyage east. Think of Mueenudin’s closing paragraph, where he depicts himself adrift in his Manhattan skyscraper, stuck in a job where he knows he simply doesn’t belong, before setting off to tell stories of the Pakistan that he knows. Even diasporic writers who aren’t writing narratives of nostalgia and healing homecoming must contend with the spectre of creating an India-of-the-mind, both for themselves and for a Western readership.

  In ‘Imaginary Homelands,’ his essential 1982 essay on the plurality of identities possessed by any Indian diasporic writer, Rushdie discusses coming to the dilemma of realism early in the composition of his 1981 novel Midnight’s Children, and building faulty memories and altered perceptions into his characters to compensate:

  But if we do look back, we must do so with the knowledge – which gives rise to profound uncertainties – that our physical alienation from India almost inevitably means that we will not be capable of reclaiming precisely the thing that was lost; that we will, in short, create fictions, not actual cities or villages, but invisible ones, imaginary homelands, Indias of the mind.

  For the past two decades or so, many of the novels dealing with the South Asian diaspora have depicted a solid subcontinent and a wavering West: the mirage is in the writer’s and character’s present, while the truth lies somewhere in the past, somewhere ‘back home.’ Chanu, the homecoming-obsessed husband in Monica Ali’s 2003 Booker shortlisted, best-selling novel Brick Lane, is a prime example of a character who believes his unsatisfying life can only be repaired by reversing his emigration. His lack of a worthy job and appreciation from his superiors in London, his struggles with money and intellectual fulfillment – Chanu believes they’ll all be repaired by a return to Bangladesh, while his wife is profoundly skeptical. Ali has the realist sense not to allow Chanu to be proved right, but dozens of novelists influenced by Ali’s foundational diasporic novel have accepted the lure of locating resolution and truth in the past. Chanu’s return is a disappointment: he goes back to the land of his past, but can’t step into an idealized memory, or a younger version of himself. When his wife asks him if the return has granted him what he wanted, he replies, ‘The English have a saying: You can’t step into the same river twice. Do you know it? Do you know what it means?’ Chanu’s saying goes further back than the English. It’s Greek, Heraclitus, a take on the essentia
l hollowness of nostalgia and the danger of basing decisions around it that’s over two thousand years old, and still difficult for readers, writers, and Chanu to actively believe.

  Despite Chanu’s inability to find a sense of home in the homeland, Brick Lane remains striking in its juxtaposition of authenticity-fetishizing techniques and blunt contradictions of fanciful conceptions of the subcontinent. The book opens in Bangladesh, 1967, with a flit through homey squalor:

  An hour and forty-five minutes before Nazneen’s life began -– began as it would proceed for quite some time, that is to say uncertainly – her mother Rupban felt an iron fist squeeze her belly. Rupban squatted on a low three-legged stool outside the kitchen hut. She was plucking a chicken because Hamid’s cousins had arrived from Jessore and there would be a feast. ‘Cheepy-cheepy, you are old and stringy,’ she said, calling the bird by name as she always did, ‘but I would like to eat you, indigestion or no indigestion. And tomorrow I will have only boiled rice, no parathas.’